Patricia Murphy. In Science's Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women.(Book review)

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Publication Date: 22-JUN-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 Northern Illinois University

Patricia Murphy. In Science's Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women. Missouri: U of Missouri P, 2006. pp. ix + 256. $39.95. ISBN: 9780826216823.



Under any other circumstances Lady Constantine might have felt a nameless fear in thus sitting aloft on a lonely column, with a forest groaning under her feet, and palaeolithic dead men feeding its roots; but the recent passionate decision stirred her pulses to an intensity beside which the ordinary tremors of feminine existence asserted themselves in vain. (108-9)

This vivid image of Lady Constantine in the neglected 1882 novel Two on a Tower seems, on a cursory reading, to confirm Patricia Murphy's argument in Chapter 3 of In Science's Shadow that Hardy's narrative compulsively strives to demarcate and safeguard science as an elitist and exclusionary masculine arena. Two on a Tower, written at a mid-point in Hardy's literary career (twelve years after Desperate Remedies and twelve years before Jude), ultimately promotes, in Murphy's provocatively contentious analysis, 'an overwhelming apprehension of female encroachment' into this...

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